As full-time travelers we are constantly looking to make our life on the road easier. In this article Scott and I want to share a gray water dumping hack we’ve learned. It makes the frequent task of dumping our greywater much faster and easier! We tend to dump our black tank every 2-3 weeks, so it’s not something that we do a lot. However, with our regular showers, we dump our greywater about twice a week. Scott and I are pretty opportunistic with dumping. Whenever we find a dump station, we will swing in there to dump, because sometimes we don’t know when we’re gonna find another one. This little dumping hack that Scott put together makes it really easy for us to pull up at the dump station and quickly dump our water. Or dump it into a honey wagon for easy disposal.
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The design of the dumping hack
We have a sewer outlet under our camper and Scott attached an elbow to it that swivels. Then onto that elbow Scott attached this cover that you just hook up a standard garden hose to. Scott and I also had an old drinking water hose that we repurposed into a grey water dumping hose.
Scott and I carry our bikes in the back and our bike rack is held by the extension hitch. You can read about our bike rack setup here. Since we have this convenient rear hitch, we just let the hose sit on top of it. This way the hose doesn’t touch the road and stays out of the way until we need it. So when we pull up to a dump station, we swing our little hose out and we’re able to dump. Now we don’t need to attach our main sewer hose every time we’re dumping grey water. Now let’s talk about some of the downsides of our setup.
Cons of the setup
- Needless to say, the new hose that Scott and I have repurposed is much narrower.
Therefore, it can take a little bit longer to dump your water. Luckily, it only takes an extra minute, so you don’t waste too much time. - Another thing to remember is that our dumping trick is only good for dumping grey water. Dumping black water will create a lot of mess and trust us, you don’t want to find out about it.
- Some dump stations are designed the way that makes this setup hard to use. The holes are too far away and we can’t reach them sometimes. Luckily that doesn’t happen very often, since most of the dump stations are pretty universal.
Other use cases
The other thing we use our grey water dumping hack for is our honey wagon. “Honey Wagon” is a portable waste tank that is used to empty holding tanks of an RV. We usually store it on the roof of our camper. However, whenever we need to use it, we just wheel our honey wagon underneath the hose, fill it up until it’s full and go dump it. And actually the honey wagon has the same cap that we used for our grey water hose setup!
Dumping process
Since we travel full-time and rarely visit campgrounds, we usually find places to dump with 
apps like iOverlander and Campendium. As Scott and I plan out a route, we look for places where we can stop and dump. Being able to simply pull up and dump quickly makes our lives so much easier.
We’ve been staying in our home state of New Hampshire for several months this summer and the closest dump station to us has been the Water Treatment Plant in Manchester. Scott usually drives up right next to the hole where we would normally put our regular hose. Then he would lift the cover off, swing out our new hose, and dump.
As you can see, it’s a little slower than normal, but we only have a half tank of grey water. This usually takes a few minutes, but It’s much simpler than getting out a main sewer hose all the time. And since it’s just grey water, we let it drain and we put the hose back away.
Final Thoughts
This has been working for us really well, we use this trick all the time! It saves us from having to get our main hose and deal with the mess that it creates. The parts to do this are really cheap and they are available here. We are hoping this was helpful! Scott and I also made a video about this hack and you can watch it below.